For Back to the
Future fans, the real 2015 was a bit of a disappointment. No
hoverboards. No flying cars. The Cubs didn’t win the World Series. And
shockingly enough, wearing two ties somehow didn’t become fashionable. Huh.
2016
may not fulfill those 1980s fantasies either, but the folks working in
Microsoft’s research labs think it may still offer up some interesting
technological advancements. The company published 16 predictions of what
advancements Microsoft Research employees expect to see next year, as well as a
look ahead to ten years from now. Their predictions are pretty far-reaching,
from new processor tech to more ethical big data. Here are some highlights.
The Internet overtakes
TV: Hsiao-Wuen
Hon, the corporate vice president for Microsoft Research Asia, expects online
video distribution to “overtake TV broadcast in 2016, and that “more people in
China will watch the Olympics through the Web than through TV.” In other words,
now might be a good time for TV broadcasters to stop fighting against
cord-cutting and to truly embrace the Internet-connected future of
entertainment.
The stylus comes of age: Principal
Researcher Bill Buxton expects to see pen-based computing come into its own in
2016. This prediction seems reasonable enough, especially considering the fact
that Apple has added stylus support to the iPad line with the Apple
Pencil and the iPad Pro.
Planned obsolesce is so
last year: Buxton
also foresees a shift in consumer priorities when it comes to tech: “The age of
digital baubles, do-dads and planned obsolescence will begin to fade, and the
focus of industry and consumers will shift from technology, per se, to enhanced
human experience, values, and potential.”
Brand new processor
types: Chris
Bishop of Microsoft Research’s Cambridge, UK outfit predicts a whole new class
of microprocessors “that are tuned to the intensive workloads of machine learning,
offering a major performance boost over GPUs.” But will they run Crysis?
Ethics in big data
becomes a big deal: The
privacy implications of data collection is an ongoing topic of debate, and
according to Principal Researcher Kate Crawford, 2016 will be an ethical
tipping point of sorts. She expects to see data science programs adopt data
ethics curriculums in order to better understand “the human implications of
large-scale data collection and experimentation.” It’s about time.
Hop on over to
Microsoft’s website and
give the full post a read. Only time will tell which of these, if any, will
come true, but Microsoft Research’s predictions make for an interesting read if
you’re into these sorts of prognostications.
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